Yahoo confirms another round of layoffs

Yahoo Inc. confirmed on Tuesday that it’s cutting 600 workers, the latest in a series of layoffs as the Web pioneer continues to struggle to find its niche in the modern online world.

The move, which amounts to a 4 percent reduction in the workforce, comes amid soft advertising growth and declining user engagement at the Sunnyvale portal. The news stands in sharp contrast to the hiring binges at other local Internet companies like Zynga Inc., Facebook Inc. and Google Inc., which is looking to expand its already 23,000-person staff by more than 2,000.

“Today’s personnel changes are part of our ongoing strategy to best position Yahoo for revenue growth and margin expansion and to support our strategy to deliver differentiated products to the marketplace,” the company said in a statement. “We’ll continue to hire on a global basis to support our key priorities.”

The company, which had 14,100 full-time employees at the end of the third quarter, said it is offering severance packages and outplacement services to the affected employees.

Since the beginning of the 2008, Yahoo has suffered through at least four major rounds of layoffs, totaling nearly 4,000 positions.

The latest rounds, in part, reflect the clean house strategy imposed by Chief Executive Carol Bartz, who took the helm in January 2009 and was tasked with turning around the company. In addition to staff reductions, under her leadership, Yahoo has jettisoned underperforming divisions, including its dating and job listing sites. The company also struck a landmark deal, recently completed, to outsource back-end search technology to Microsoft Corp.’s Bing engine.

Meanwhile, the company has been trying to recast itself as a media and communications business, building out its news products, overhauling its e-mail service and integrating social networking elements throughout its offerings.

Bartz has insisted she needs more time to resolve the complex issues that plague Yahoo, stressing that it took Steve Jobs four years to turn around Apple Inc. after his return in the late 1990s.

“Yahoo is a company with tremendous potential,” Bartz said during the third quarter investor conference call. “We have a lot of work to do in the months ahead, but we are clearly making progress.”